Milton Babbitt, Composer Who Gloried in Complexity, Dies at 94 - The New York Times The New York Times Music |Milton Babbitt, a Composer Who Gloried in Complexity, Dies at 94 Search Continue reading the main story Milton Babbitt , an influential composer, theorist and teacher who wrote music that was intensely rational and for many listeners impenetrably abstruse, died on Saturday. He was 94 and lived in Princeton, N.J. Paul Lansky, a composer who studied with Mr. Babbitt and was a colleague at Princeton University , where Mr. Babbitt remained an emeritus professor of composition, said that Mr. Babbitt died at a hospital in Princeton. Mr. Babbitt, who had a lively sense of humor despite the reputation for severity that his music fostered, sometimes referred to himself as a maximalist to stress the musical and philosophical distance between his style and the simpler, more direct style of younger contemporaries like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other Minimalist composers. It was an apt description.

Although he dabbled early in his career with theater music, his Composition for Orchestra (1940) ushered in a structurally complex, profoundly organized style that was rooted in Arnold Schoenberg’s serial method. Continue reading the main story But Mr. Babbitt expanded on Mr. Schoenberg’s approach. In Mr. Schoenberg’s system, a composer begins by arranging the 12 notes of the Western scale in a particular order called a tone row, or series, on which the work is based. Mr. Babbitt was the first to use this serial ordering not only with pitches but also with dynamics, timbre, duration, registration and other elements. His methods became the basis of the “total serialism” championed in the 1950s by Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and other European composers. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Babbitt began exploring this path in Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for Four Instruments (1948), and adhered to it through his entire career. He composed prolifically for chamber ensembles and instrumental soloists and created a substantial and varied catalog of vocal works.

He also composed a compact but vital group of orchestral pieces and an enduring series of works for synthesizer, often in combination with voices or acoustic instruments. Mr. Babbitt liked to give his pieces colorful titles, often with puns (“The Joy of More Sextets,” for example), and said that in selecting titles he tried to avoid both the stale and the obscure. Yet when Mr. Babbitt explained his compositional approach in essays, lectures and program notes, they could be as difficult to understand as his music. In one program note, he spoke of “models of similar, interval-preserving, registrally uninterpreted pitch-class and metrically durationally uninterpreted time-point aggregate arrays.” He often said in interviews that every note in a contemporary composition should be so thoroughly justified that the alteration of a tone color or a dynamic would ruin the work’s structure. And although colleagues who worked in atonal music objected when their music was described as cerebral or academic, Mr. Babbitt embraced both terms and came to be regarded as the standard-bearer of the ultrarational extreme in American composition.

That reputation was based in part on an article published by High Fidelity magazine in February 1958 under the title “Who Cares if You Listen?” The headline was often cited as evidence of contemporary composers’ disregard for the public’s sensibilities, and Mr. Babbitt objected that it had been added by an editor, without his permission. But whatever his objections, the article did argue that contemporary composition was a business for specialists, on both the composing and listening end of the transaction, and that the general public’s objections were irrelevant. “Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by other forms of activity?” Mr. Babbitt wrote. “The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.” Listeners who overlooked Mr.

Babbitt’s philosophical abstractions and thorny analyses — who simply sat back and listened, rather than trying to understand his harmonies and structural processes — often discovered works of great expressive variety. These range from the intense emotionality of “A Solo Requiem” (1976) to the shimmering surfaces and eerie pictorialism of “Philomel” (1964) and the poetic flow of some of the solo piano works, which have the spirit of advanced jazz improvisations. Indeed, in his “All Set” (1957), for winds, brasses and percussion, he achieved a freely improvisatory feeling within an atonal harmonic context. Milton Byron Babbitt was born in Philadelphia on May 10, 1916, and grew up in Jackson, Miss. He began studying the violin when he was 4 but soon switched to clarinet and saxophone. Early in his life he was attracted to jazz and theater music. Advertisement He was making his own arrangements of popular songs at 7, and when he was 13, he won a local songwriting contest. Photo Milton Babbitt at Carnegie Hall in 1998. Credit Steve J.

Sherman Although the music he went on to write rejected the easily assimilated tonal language of popular music, Mr. Babbitt retained a fondness for theater songs all his life and was said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the style. “If you know anybody who knows more popular music of the ’20s or ’30s than I do, I want to know who it is,” he said in an Internet interview with the New Music Box in 2001. “I grew up playing every kind of music in the world, and I know more pop music from the ’20s and ’30s, it’s because of where I grew up. We had to imitate Jan Garber one night; we had to imitate Jean Goldkette the next night. We heard everything from the radio; we had to do it all by ear. We took down their arrangements; we stole their arrangements; we transcribed them, approximately. We played them for a country club dance one night and for a high school dance the next.” In 1946, Mr. Babbitt tried his hand at a musical, a collaboration with Richard Koch and Richard S.

Childs called “Fabulous Voyage.” The work was not produced, but in 1982 Mr. Babbitt published three of its songs, which showed a firm command of the idiom and considerable charm. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy But Mr. Babbitt set his course toward serious avant-garde composition in 1932, when he played through the scores of some Schoenberg piano music that an uncle had brought home from Europe. At the time, Mr. Babbitt was a 16-year-old philosophy student at the University of Pennsylvania. The next year he became a composition student of Marion Bauer and Philip James at New York University, and in 1935 he began studying privately with Roger Sessions. In 1938, Sessions invited Mr. Babbitt to join the Princeton composition faculty, and Mr. Babbitt succeeded him as the William Shubael Conant Professor of Music in 1965. Mr.

Babbitt was also on the faculty of the Juilliard School, where he began teaching in 1973, as well as at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies; the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood ; the new-music academy at Darmstadt, Germany; and the New England Conservatory in Boston. A series of six lectures he gave at the University of Wisconsin was published as “Words About Music” in 1987. Mr. Babbitt’s articles about music were published as “The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt” by Princeton University Press in 2003. His students included Mario Davidovsky and John Eaton, who have followed essentially in Mr. Babbitt’s atonal path (although Mr. Eaton later broke away), and the theater composer Stephen Sondheim. During World War II, Mr. Babbitt taught mathematics at Princeton and undertook secret research in Washington. He also evolved his extended form of serialism during these years.

But immediately after the war he pursued a split musical path, exploring his rigorous serial style in his abstract concert works, on one hand, and completing “Fabulous Voyage” and a film score, “Into the Good Ground” (1949). In the 1950s Mr. Babbitt was hired as a consultant by RCA, which was developing the most sophisticated electronic-music instrument of the time, the Mark II synthesizer. The Mark II became the centerpiece of the new Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959. Mr. Babbitt was one of the center’s first directors, along with Sessions, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Babbitt’s earliest electronic pieces, Composition for Synthesizer (1961) and Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964), were as intensely organized as his instrumental music had been. Indeed, he saw the synthesizer as a kind of liberation from the physical limitations of living performers. “The medium provides a kind of full satisfaction for the composer,” he said in a 1969 interview with The New York Times.

“I love going to the studio with my work in my head, realizing it while I am there and walking out with the tape under my arm. I can then send it anywhere in the world, knowing exactly how it will sound.” The early synthesizer pieces have become classics, but Mr. Babbitt quickly moved forward, writing works in which electronic soundtracks accompanied live performers. Particularly striking are the vocal works “Vision and Prayer” (1961) and “Philomel,” and “Reflections” (1975) for piano and tape. He stopped composing music with an electronic component in 1976, when the Columbia-Princeton studio was vandalized, and it was decided that restoring it would be too expensive. Many of Mr. Babbitt’s works have been recorded, and he has always had the loyalty of performers willing to devote the effort required to render his music sensibly.

Among his earliest champions were the soprano Bethany Beardslee, for whom he wrote many of his vocal works (“A Solo Requiem” was written in memory of her husband, Godfrey Winham); the Juilliard String Quartet; the pianists Robert Miller and Robert Helps; the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble; and the Group for Contemporary Music. In the 1970s and 1980s, a generation of young instrumentalists inured to the complexities of contemporary music became eloquent champions of Mr. Babbitt’s music . Among them are the pianists Robert Taub and the guitarist David Starobin, who have commissioned and recorded Mr. Babbitt’s works. Mr. Babbitt’s orchestral music is so exceedingly complex that both the New York Philharmonic, in 1969, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1989, postponed premieres when the available rehearsal time proved insufficient. He did, however, have champions among top-flight conductors, the most notable being James Levine, who in 1967, as a 24-year-old fledgling conductor, led the premiere of Mr. Babbitt’s “Correspondences.” Mr.

Levine later recorded Mr. Babbitt’s music with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and commissioned his Second Piano Concerto for the Met Orchestra and Mr. Taub in 1998. He regularly included Mr. Babbitt’s chamber works on his Met Chamber Ensemble programs, and in 2004 Mr. Babbitt dedicated his Concerti for Orchestra to Mr. Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned it. Mr. Babbitt received a special Pulitzer citation for his life’s work in 1982, and in 1986 he was awarded a $300,000 MacArthur Fellowship. His earlier awards included the Joseph Bearns Prize from Columbia University, for his “Music for the Mass” in 1941; the New York Music Critics Circle Awards, for Composition for Four Instruments in 1949 and for “Philomel” in 1964; and the Creative Arts Award from Brandeis University in 1970. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1965. Mr. Babbitt’s wife, Sylvia, died in 2005.

He is survived by a daughter, Betty Anne Duggan, and two grandchildren, Julie and Adam. Correction: February 6, 2011 An obituary in some editions last Sunday about the composer Milton Babbitt misstated the name of one of his compositions, the name of a film for which he wrote the score, and the name of an ensemble that was an early champion of his work. The composition was titled “All Set,” not “All Set for Jazz.” The film was titled “Into the Good Ground,” not “Into the Ground.” And the ensemble was the Group for Contemporary Music, not the Group of Contemporary Music. A version of this article appears in print on January 30, 2011, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Milton Babbitt, a Composer Who Gloried in Complexity, Dies at 94. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Milton Babbitt, musician and composer from Jackson, Mississippi by Lisa Hill (SHS) Lisa Hill, SHS Researcher Milton Byron Babbitt was born on May 10, 1916, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was a mathematician.

Milton Babbitt grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, learning to play the violin at age four and later he learned to play the clarinet and saxophone. When he was just fifteen years old, he graduated high school, and he became a jazz musician and pop music composer. In 1931, Babbitt enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania with the intention of studying mathematics as his father did. However, music interested him more, so he transferred to New York University where he studied composition. Babbitt earned his degree from New York University in music in 1935 and later from Princeton in music in 1942 “Symposium in Honor of Milton Babbitt”). He joined the Princeton music faculty in 1938 and received one of Princeton’s first Master of Fine Arts degrees in 1942. Then he actually did mathematical research during World War II in Washington, DC, and Princeton, where he became a member of the mathematics faculty from 1943 to 1945 (Barkin & Brody 2001).

Babbitt is a theorist and composer (“Smith Archives”) whose works for instruments and accomplishments in synthesized sound have made him one of the most recognized composers of the 20th century. Babbitt’s interest in electronic music resulted in his being hired by RCA as consultant composer to work with their RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and in 1961 produced his Composition for Synthesizer. Babbitt writes both electronic music and music for conventional musical instruments, and often combines the two. He has great talent and an instinct for jazz and other American popular music. In addition to teaching at Princeton, he has also taught at The Juilliard School. He founded the Committee of Direction for the Electronic Music Center of Columbia-Princeton Universities. He has been awarded many honors including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986 (sometimes called the “Genius Award”) and a Pulitzer Prize Citation for his “life’s work as a distinguished and seminal American composer.” Milton Babbitt is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a part of the American Academy of Arts. He was the recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for music composition in 1988.

He has had a major impact on the works of contemporary musicians. (Schirmer, G.). Babbitt once said, “I want a piece of music to be literally as much as possible (“Smith Archives”). Babbitt is a leading composer of serialization (the use of predetermined series of pitches, rhythms, tone colors, and durations.) This is the start for the composition of music. His work contains the order of twelve tones in the vertical and linear succession. Two Sonnets for baritone, viola, clarinet, and cello create a parallel between the rhyme scheme and serial employed. The Third Quartet shows features of metronomic stability. Babbitt believes that a serious composer would accept his isolation from the public as a way of functioning and should help to develop the resources of his art in his work not suitable for most listeners. (“Babbitt, Milton Byron”). His early influences included Webern and Schoenberg. Babbitt wanted to have control of every aspect of his compositions in a serialization of 12 tones, 12 dynamic levels, 12 note values, 12 instrumental timbres, and 12 time intervals.

He compares the 20th century serialization of music as a revolution equal to the 20th century revolution in physics. Milton Babbitt wrote the article, “Who Cares If You Listen?” dealing with the composer as a writer of music that the general public does not understand or even want to understand (Arnold, C.). Babbitt is a great composer and accomplished man who still works with serialization today (see update below). Milton Babbitt once said, “I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as ‘serious,’ ‘advanced,’ contemporary music. This composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy — and, usually, considerable money — on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. He is, in essence, a ‘vanity’ composer. The general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in his music. The majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly-attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow professionals.

At best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.” (Arnold, C.). Nevertheless, the compositional and intellectual wisdom of Milton Babbitt has influenced a wide range of contemporary musicians. His All Set, for jazz ensemble, reveals an extraordinary compositional flexibility, uniquely American and vintage Babbitt. In May, 1998, there was a symposium in honor of Milton Babbitt in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Babbitt has been a friend of the Music Division in the Library of Congress for many years and has served on the Coolidge Foundation Committee. Some of his works have been shown at the Library and show insight into many of the most important developments in music. The purpose of the symposium in his honor was to acknowledge those developments (“Symposium in Honor of Milton Babbitt”). Milton Babbitt’s wife Sylvia died in 2005. Together they had one daughter, Betty Anne Duggan. Babbitt’s brother Albert E. Babbitt, Jr., a mathematician who died in 2005.

2011 UPDATE: Milton Babbitt died on January 29, 2011, at the age of 94 in Princeton, New Jersey. The Associated Press stated that Babbitt was known for his complex orchestral compositions and credited with developing the first electronic synthesizer. Babbitt had earned degrees from Princeton and New York University and joined Princeton’s faculty in 1938. He became a professor emeritus of music there in 1984. In the 1950s, RCA hired Babbitt as a consultant while it was developing the Mark II synthesizer. The synthesizer was installed at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Cente,r and Babbitt became a founder and director. He was best known for electronic music blended with vocal performances in compositions such as Vision and Prayer and Philomel in the 1960s and Reflections in 1975.

Timeline 1916– May 10- Babbitt was born in Philadelphia, PA, but grew up in Jackson, Mississippi 1931- Began his college educated at the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics, but soon moved to New York University to study music 1948- The first works in which linear succession, harmonic stimulaneity, dynamics, duration, articulation, register, and timber were all derived from a single, all-inclusive premise were written by Babbitt. 1932-35- Educated at New York University in music. 1938-42- Babbitt taught on the music faculty at Princeton 1942- Graduated from Princeton University in music. 1943-45- Babbitt was on the mathematics faculty at Princeton. 1959- Helped found the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. 1960- Named Conant Professor of Music at Princeton. 1973- Composition faculty at the Julliard School of Music. 1977- Babbitt’s works premiered at the Library of Congress. 1981- Professor Emeritus at Princeton.

1982- Received a Pulitzer Prize Citation for his life’s work 1986–Received MacArthur Fellowship for $500,000 1998- Symposium in Honor of Milton Babbitt. 2011–January 29 at age 96 electronic music | Britannica.com Electronic music Electronic music, any music involving electronic processing, such as recording and editing on tape, and whose reproduction involves the use of loudspeakers . Electronic organ. r4Rick Although any music produced or modified by electrical, electromechanical, or electronic means can be called electronic music, it is more precise to say that for a piece of music to be electronic its composer must anticipate the electronic processing subsequently applied to his musical concept, so that the final product reflects in some way his interaction with the medium. This is no different from saying that a composer should have in mind an orchestra when he composes a symphony and a piano when he composes a piano sonata . A conventional piece of popular music does not become electronic music by being played on an electronically amplified guitar , nor does a Bach fugue become electronic music if played on an electronic organ instead of a pipe organ .

Some experimental compositions , often containing chance elements and perhaps of indeterminate scoring, permit but do not necessarily demand electronic realization, but this is a specialized situation. Electronic music is produced from a wide variety of sound resources—from sounds picked up by microphones to those produced by electronic oscillators (generating basic acoustical wave forms such as sine waves, square waves, and sawtooth waves), complex computer installations, and microprocessors—that are recorded on tape and then edited into a permanent form . Generally, except for one type of performed music that has come to be called “live electronic music” (see below), electronic music is played back through loudspeakers either alone or in combination with ordinary musical instruments . This article covers both early experimentation with electronic sound-producing devices and composers’ subsequent exploitation of electronic equipment as a technique of composition . Throughout the discussion it should be clear that electronic music is not a style but rather a technique yielding diverse results in the hands of different composers. Similar Topics white noise Historically, electronic music is one aspect of the larger development of 20th-century music strongly characterized by a search for new technical resources and modes of expression.

Before 1945 composers sought to liberate themselves from the main Classical–Romantic tradition of tonal thinking and to reconstruct their thinking along new lines, for the most part either Neoclassical or atonal and 12-tone, in which a composition is built up entirely from a tone row consisting of all 12 notes of the ordinary chromatic scale. This pre-World War II period was accompanied by substantial experimentation with electrical and electronic devices. The most important outcome for the composer was the development of a number of electronic musical instruments (such as the Hammond organ and the theremin) that provided new timbres and that laid the technical foundations for the future development of electronic music proper from about 1948 onward. The rapid development of computer technology has had its effect in music, too, so much so that the term computer music is replacing electronic music as the more accurate description of the most significant interaction between the composer and the electronic medium. Electronic music is represented not only by a wide variety of 20th-century works, and not only by serious concert pieces, but also by a substantial literature of theatre , film , and television scores and by multimedia works that use all types of audiovisual techniques.

Electronic music for theatre and films seems an especially appropriate replacement for a disembodied, nonexistent orchestra heard from a tape or a sound track. Electronic popular music has also won adherents. This mostly has consisted of arrangements of standard popular music for electronic synthesizers, the tentative use of electronic alterations by some of the more ambitious and experimental rock groups, and the preparation of recordings by innovative studio techniques. History and stylistic development Music: Fact or Fiction? Beginnings During the 19th century attempts were made to produce and record sounds mechanically or electromechanically. For example, the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz traced wave forms of regular sounds to check results of his acoustical researches. An important event was the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner , independently, in the 1870s and 1880s. This invention not only marked the beginning of the recording industry but also showed that all the acoustical content of musical sounds could be captured (in principle, if not in actuality at that time) and be faithfully retained for future use. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros.

Folds Its Tent The first major effort to generate musical sounds electrically was carried out over many years by an American, Thaddeus Cahill , who built a formidable assembly of rotary generators and telephone receivers to convert electrical signals into sound. Cahill called his remarkable invention the telharmonium , which he started to build about 1895 and continued to improve for years thereafter. The instrument failed because it was complex, impractical, and could not produce sounds of any magnitude since amplifiers and loudspeakers had not yet been invented. Nevertheless, Cahill’s concepts were basically sound. He was a visionary who lived ahead of his time, and his instrument was the ancestor of present-day electronic music synthesizers. The Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo was another early exponent of synthesized music. As early as 1913 Russolo proposed that all music be destroyed and that new instruments reflecting current technology be built to perform a music expressive of industrialized society. Russolo subsequently did build a number of mechanically activated intonarumori (noise instruments) that grated, hissed, scratched, rumbled, and shrieked. Russolo’s instruments and most of his music apparently vanished during World War II.

Impact of technological developments Between World War I and World War II developments occurred that led more directly to modern electronic music, although most of them were technically, rather than musically, important. First was the development of audio-frequency technology. By the early 1920s basic circuits for sine-, square-, and sawtooth-wave generators had been invented, as had amplifiers, filter circuits, and, most importantly, loudspeakers. (Sine waves are signals consisting of “pure tones”—i.e., without overtones; sawtooth waves comprise fundamental tones and all related overtones; square waves consist only of the odd-numbered partials, or component tones, of the natural harmonic series.) Also, mechanical acoustical recording was replaced by electrical recording in the late 1920s. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Second was the development of electromechanical and electronic musical instruments designed to replace existing musical instruments—specifically, the invention of electronic organs . This was a remarkable achievement and one that absorbed the attention of many ingenious inventors and circuit designers.

It should be stressed, however, that it was the objective of these organ builders to simulate and replace pipe organs and harmoniums, not to provide novel instruments that would stimulate the imaginations of avant-garde composers. Most electromechanical and electronic organs employ subtractive synthesis, as do pipe organs. Signals rich in harmonic partials (such as sawtooth waves) are selected by the performer at the keyboard and combined and shaped acoustically by filter circuits that simulate the formant , or resonant-frequency, spectra—i.e., the acoustical components—of conventional organ stops. The formant depends on the filter circuit and does not relate to the frequency of a tone being produced. A low tone shaped by a given formant (a given stop) is normally rich in harmonics, while a high tone normally is poor in them. Psychologically, one expects this from all musical instruments, not only organs but also orchestral instruments. Some electronic organs operate on the opposing principle of additive synthesis, whereby individually generated sine waves are added together in varying proportions to yield a complex wave form. The most successful of these is the Hammond organ , patented by Laurens Hammond in 1934.

The Hammond organ has odd qualities because the richness of its harmonic content does not diminish as the player goes up the keyboard. The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (in Momente, 1961–62), the Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim (in Colorazione, 1968), and a few others have scored specifically for this instrument. Third was the development of novel electronic musical instruments designed to supply timbres not provided by ordinary musical instruments. During the 1920s there was a burst of interest in building an extraordinary variety of such instruments, ranging from practical to absurd. The most successful of these were relatively few in number, were monophonic (i.e., could play only one melodic line at a time), and survive chiefly because some important music has been scored for them. These are the theremin , invented in 1920 by a Russian scientist, Leon Theremin; the Ondes Martenot , first built in 1928 by a French musician and scientist, Maurice Martenot; and the trautonium , designed by a German, Friedrich Trautwein, in 1930.

Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies The theremin is a beat-frequency audio oscillator (sine-wave generator) that has two condensers placed not inside the circuit chassis but, rather, outside, as antennas . Because these antennas respond to the presence of nearby objects, the pitch and amplitude of the output signal of the theremin can be controlled by the manner in which a performer moves his hands in its vicinity. A skilled performer can produce all sorts of effects, including scales, glissandi, and flutters. A number of compositions have been written for this instrument since the 1920s. The Ondes Martenot consists of a touch-sensitive keyboard and a slide-wire glissando generator that are both controlled by the performer’s right hand, as well as some stops controlled by the left hand. These, in turn, activate a sawtooth-wave generator that delivers a signal to one or more output transducers. The instrument has been used extensively by several French composers, including Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez , and by the French-American composer Edgard Varèse.

The trautonium, like the Ondes Martenot, uses a sawtooth-wave generator as its signal source and a keyboard of novel design that permits not just ordinary tuning but unusual scales as well. Most of the music composed for this instrument is of German origin, an example being the Concertino for Trautonium and Strings (1931) by Paul Hindemith . In about 1950 a polyphonic version (capable of playing several voices, or parts, simultaneously) of this instrument was built by Oskar Sala, a former student of Trautwein and Hindemith, for preparing sound tracks in a Berlin film studio. These instruments have become virtually obsolete, however, because all the sounds they produce can easily be duplicated by electronic music synthesizers. Tape music With tape music the history of electronic music in the narrower sense begins.

This history seems split into three main periods: an early (by now classical) period lasting from the commercial introduction of the tape recorder immediately following World War II until about 1960; a second period that featured the introduction of electronic music synthesizers and the acceptance of the electronic medium as a legitimate compositional activity; and the third period, in which computer technology is rapidly becoming both the dominant resource and the dominant concern. Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano The invention of the tape recorder gave composers of the 1950s an exciting new musical instrument to use for new musical experiences. Fascination with the thing itself was the dominant motivation for composing electronic tape music. Musically, the 1950s, in contrast to the 1960s, were relatively introverted years: in all kinds of music, the focus of interest was technique and style, especially with the avant-garde. In time, the medium became fairly well understood, the techniques for handling it became increasingly standardized, and a repertory of characteristic and historically important compositions came into being.

The burning issues were whether tape would replace live musicians; whether the composer was at last freed from the humiliations so often endured to get his music into the concert hall; and whether a new medium of expression had been created, quite different from and independent of instrumental music, analogous , say, to photography as opposed to traditional painting. It became increasingly evident, however, that there was no reason to think that the electronic tape medium would eliminate instrumental performance by live musicians. Tape was increasingly regarded as something that could be—but did not need to be—treated as a unique medium. Thus the notion that the tape recorder could function as one instrument in an ensemble grew more and more popular. This conception obviated the visual monotony of an evening in an auditorium with nothing to look at but a loudspeaker. To this has been added a further stage of evolution, namely, live electronic music, in which the tape recorder and its tape is eliminated or greatly restricted in function, and transformations of the sounds of musical instruments are effected at the concert with electronic equipment.

Not infrequently, this kind of performance environment also involves scores in which aleatory (chance, or random), improvisatory, or quasi-improvisatory musical guidelines for the manipulation of such equipment are supplied by a composer who prefers to let what happens just happen. Actually, it is open to question whether live electronic music is really an advance or a reversion to a more primitive state of the art, in the sense that it is the enhancement of the timbres of familiar instruments, rather than music conceived totally in terms of electronic media per se. Establishment of electronic studios The first period of development was certainly one into which Europeans put the most consistent work. Tape music quickly gained recognition and financial support, and, before long, a number of well-equipped electronic music studios were established, primarily in government-supported broadcast facilities. Some important work was also done in the United States, but this was much more fragmentary, and not until after 1958 did Americans begin to catch up, either technically or artistically.

In 1948 two French composers, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry , and their associates at Radiodiffusion et Télévision Française in Paris began to produce tape collages (analogous to collages in the visual arts), which they called musique concrète . All the materials they processed on tape were recorded sounds—sound effects, musical fragments, vocalizings, and other sounds and noises produced by man, his environment, and his artifacts . Such sounds were considered “concrete,” hence the term musique concrète. To this Paris group certainly belongs the credit both for originating the concept of tape music as such and for demonstrating how effective certain types of tape manipulation can be in transforming sounds. These transformations included speed alteration, variable speed control, playing tapes backward, and signal feedback loops. Schaeffer however, opposed the use of electronic oscillators as sound sources, claiming that these were not “concrete” sound sources, not “real,” and hence artificial and anti-humanistic.

Two of the most successful and best known musique concrète compositions of this early period are Schaeffer and Henry’s Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950; Symphony for One Man Only) and Henry’s Orphée (1953), a ballet score written for the Belgian dancer Maurice Béjart . These and similar works created a sensation when first presented to the public. Symphonie pour un homme seul, a descriptive suite about man and his activities, is an extended composition in 11 movements. Orphée is concerned with the descent of Orpheus into Hades. The second event of significance was the formation of an electronic music studio in Cologne by Herbert Eimert , a composer working for Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (now Westdeutscher Rundfunk), who was advised in turn by Werner Meyer-Eppler, an acoustician from the University of Bonn. Eimert was soon joined by Karlheinz Stockhausen , who composed the first really important tape composition from this studio, the now-famous Gesang der Jünglinge (1956; Song of Youth).

The Cologne studio soon became a focal point of the reemergence of Germany as a dominant force in new music. At Cologne emphasis was immediately placed on electronically generated sounds rather than concrete sounds and on electronic sound modifications such as filtering and modulating rather than tape manipulation. Eimert and Stockhausen also published a journal, Die Reihe (“The Row”), in which appeared articles emphasizing the “purity” of electronic sounds and the necessity of coupling electronic music to serial composing (using ordered groups of pitches, rhythms, and other musical elements as compositional bases), which made no more sense than the Paris group’s insistence on using only nonelectronic, nonserial material. This activity was part of the campaign of the 1950s that brought about the collapse of Neoclassicism (a style that drew equally on 20th-century musical idioms and earlier, formal types); the emergence of the Austrian composer Anton von Webern as the father figure of the new music; the development of total serialism , pointillism (a style making use of individual tones placed in a very sparse texture), and intellectualism; and an emphasis on technique. The examples set by these two studios were soon widely imitated in Europe .

This trend continued in the 1960s, with many more studios, from modest to elaborate, being set up in almost every major urban centre in Europe. As time passed, the techniques and equipment in the newer studios became more standardized and reliable, and the rather peculiar issue of concrete versus electronic sounds ceased to concern anyone. In the United States the production of electronic music, until 1958, was much more sporadic. The only continuing effort of this sort was the project undertaken by two composers at Columbia University , Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky , to create a professional tape studio and to compose music illustrating the musical possibilities of the tape medium. Luening and Ussachevsky often collaborated on joint compositions. They gained particular attention for the composition of several concerto-like works for tape recorder and orchestra. In 1959 Luening and Ussachevsky joined with another U.S. composer, Milton Babbitt, to organize, on a much larger scale, the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center, in which an impressive number of composers of professional repute have worked.

Other tape compositions in the early 1950s in the United States were largely those of individual composers working as best they could under improvised circumstances. One major composer who did so was Varèse , who completed Déserts, for tape and instrumental ensemble, in 1954, and Poème électronique, for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Another was John Cage , who completed Williams Mix in 1952 and Fontana Mix in 1958. Both Varèse and Cage had anticipated the electronic medium; Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) for RCA test records and percussion can well be regarded as a forerunner of current live electronic music. With the establishment of the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois in 1958 by Lejaren Hiller and the University of Toronto studio in 1959 by Myron Schaeffer, the formation of facilities for both production and teaching began to move forward. The number of studios in university music departments grew rapidly, and they soon became established as essential in teaching as well as composing.

The individual components may vary in a well-designed “classic” studio, but basically the equipment may be divided into five categories: sound sources (sine-wave, square-wave, sawtooth-wave, and white-noise generators; and microphones for picking up concrete sounds); routing and control circuitry (patch panels, switching boards, and mixers for coupling components together; amplifiers; and output connections); signal modifiers (modulators, frequency shifters, artificial reverberators, filters, variable-speed tape recorders, and time compression–expansion devices); monitors and quality-control equipment (frequency counter, spectrum analyzer, VU metres that monitor recording levels, oscilloscope, power amplifiers with loudspeakers and headsets, and workshop facilities); and recording and playback equipment, including high-quality tape recorders. With this equipment the composer records sounds, both electronic and microphoned; modifies them singly or in montages by operations such as modulation, reverberation, and filtering; and finally re-records them in increasingly complex patterns. Inevitably, a major part of the composer’s effort is tape editing, unless he is satisfied with the crudest string of effects merely linked together in sequence.

As in any other kind of music, the aesthetic merit of an electronic music composition seems to depend not only on musical ideas as such but also on the way in which they relate to one another and how they are used to build up a musical structure. The integration of the tape has become a rather popular form of chamber music , if not of symphonic music. Varèse’s Déserts is an early example of this. It is scored for a group of 15 musicians and a two-channel tape and consists of four instrumental episodes interrupted by three tape interludes. In other works the tape recorder is “performed” together with the remaining instruments rather than merely in contrast to them. The problems of coordination, however, can become overriding, for it is difficult for a group of performers to follow a tape exactly. Obviously, the tape dominates the situation, remorselessly moving along no matter what happens in the rest of the group. Thousands of electronic tape compositions were in existence by the early 1970s, many of ephemeral interest. It is relatively rare for a composer to have established a reputation solely as a composer of tape music.

Pierre Henry perhaps is an example, but in general the important names in instrumental music of the 1950s and 1960s are the significant contributors in electronic music, too. Stockhausen remained in the forefront of electronic music composers with several important pieces following Gesang der Jünglinge. These included Kontakte (1959–60; Contacts), for tape, piano, and percussion, and Telemusik (1966), for tape alone. Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna , both Italians, worked for a while at the Radio Audizioni Italia (now Radiotelevisione Italiana) studio in Milan. Besides Différences (1958–60), a composition for tape and chamber group, Berio’s tape pieces include Thema-Omaggio a Joyce (1958; Homage to Joyce) and Visage (1961), which exploited the unusual voice of the American singer Cathy Berberian. In the United States the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center has had the greatest output, a long list of composers besides Luening and Ussachevsky having used its facilities.

Tape music from the University of Illinois studio includes Salvatore Martirano’s L’s GA (1967), a savage political satire for tape, films, helium bomb, and gas-masked politico. The University of Toronto studio, in spite of its technical excellence, has not been well represented on discs. One Canadian piece that is very amusing, however, is Hugh LeCaine’s Dripsody (1955), all the sounds of which are derived from the splash of a single drop of water. Music synthesizers Composing tape music by the classic method was neither easy nor free of technical pitfalls. A complex piece had to be assembled from hundreds or even thousands of fragments of tape. Splicing these sounds together consumed a vast amount of time and could also lead to an accumulation of errors and deterioration of the sound. Consequently, substantial efforts were expended to reduce this work load and at the same time improve quality. Music synthesizers were the first product of these efforts. They cannot, however, be regarded as more than an intermediate technological development because of later computer technology (see below).

In contrast to Cahill’s period, by the 1950s the means finally existed to construct full-scale music synthesizers, starting with the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizers, designed by Harry Olson and Herbert Belar, research scientists working at the RCA Laboratories at Princeton, New Jersey . The first machine was introduced in 1955; a second, improved model was turned over to the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959. The basic advance of the RCA synthesizer was an information input mechanism, a device for punching sets of instructions into a wide roll of punched paper tape. The composer could at any time during the programming process interrupt this activity to listen to what had been punched, to make corrections, and to edit the material before making a final paper tape that then constituted the “master score” of the composition. The composer whose name became particularly associated with the RCA synthesizer was Milton Babbitt . He had developed a precisely defined compositional technique involving total serialization (i.e., of every musical element). When he became aware of the synthesizer, he was anxious to use it, because it gave him the opportunity to realize his music more precisely than had hitherto been the case.

Among Babbitt’s compositions created with this machine were Composition for Synthesizer (1961), Vision and Prayer (1961), Ensembles for Synthesizer (1963), Philomel (1964), and Phonemena (1974). In about 1960 a new circuit, the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), attracted the attention of engineers interested in electronic music because the frequency of its output signal is proportional to an independently generated input voltage rather than being internally set. The response is immediate because no mechanical couplings or controls are required. Robert Moog was the first to design several types of compact synthesizers of moderate price that supplied an extended range of possibilities for sound manipulation. In addition to VCO’s, which produce sine, square, sawtooth, and triangular waves, the Moog synthesizer contained white-noise generators, attack and decay generators (controlling a sound’s onset and fading), voltage-controlled amplifiers, and band-pass filters and sequencers. Moog electronic sound synthesizer Allen H.

Kelson One major advance in sound manipulation provided by VCO’s is frequency modulation; if the input is a periodic function, the output frequency will vary periodically to provide tremolos, trills, and warble tones. Moog’s synthesizer soon had to compete with several other synthesizers of essentially the same design, the Buchla Electronic Music Box, the ARP, and the later, more sophisticated Prophet 10. These popular synthesizers eliminate much of the drudgery of tape splicing, but at a price. The range of timbres and processes is more limited because they operate by subtractive synthesis and impose transients that affect all partials (component vibrations) of a complex wave identically. An advantage of a harmonic tone generator built in 1962 by James Beauchamp at the University of Illinois, also from VCO’s, was that it used additive synthesis —i.e., it created sound by combining signals for pure tones (sine waves)—instead of removing partials from a complex signal. It was designed so that each partial of a sound could have its own entry point, its own rise time, and its own decay time.

The improvement in tone quality was enormous, because the ear normally expects nuances such as higher partials that decay faster than lower ones. Salvatore Martirano’s Underworld (1965) is a good example of music in which the tape was made largely by additive synthesis. Learn about, and listen to, the Synthi 100, an analogue synthesizer made in the 1970s by Electronic … © University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (A Britannica Publishing Partner) A composer closely associated with synthesizers is Morton Subotnik, who has produced a series of extended electronic music compositions, starting with Silver Apples of the Moon (1967). These pieces were created on the Buchla synthesizer, and any one of them demonstrates in relatively unmodified form the types of sounds one may obtain with these instruments. A word should be said about realizations of instrumental music through synthesizers, notably an early, commercially successful album called Switched-on Bach (1968), arrangements made by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos on a Moog synthesizer. The record displayed technical excellence in the sounds created and made the electronic synthesis of music more intelligible to the general listening public.

This is useful so long as it is realized that the materials on the record are arrangements of familiar music, not original compositions. (Carlos later created an original electronic score for the science fiction film Tron.) Page 1 of 2 Focus! 2016 Presents "Milton Babbitt's World: A Centennial Celebration" in January 2016 | The Juilliard School Focus! 2016 Presents "Milton Babbitt's World: A Centennial Celebration" in January 2016 Subhead Six Free Concerts from Friday, January 22 through Friday, January 29, 2016 Start Date Milton Babbitt Body NEW YORK –– The 32nd annual Focus! festival, Milton Babbitt’s World: A Centennial Celebration, is devoted to composer, teacher, and writer, the late Milton Babbitt, who was a longtime member of Juilliard’s composition faculty (1971 to 2008) and remained an emeritus faculty member.

The festival, which will include the world premiere of Babbitt’s Concerti for Violin, Orchestra, and Synthesized Sound, opens with the New Juilliard Ensemble, conducted by Joel Sachs, on Friday, January 22, 2016, at 7:30pm in Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater in a program with works by Milton Babbitt, Juilliard faculty member and composer Jonathan Dawe, Alexander Goehr, Stefan Wolpe, and Ursula Mamlok. The festival continues with four chamber music concerts, Monday, January 25 through Thursday, January 28, 2016, and closes with a concert by the Juilliard Orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, on Friday, January 29, 2016, at 7:30pm in Alice Tully Hall. The closing program features works by some of Milton Babbitt’s favorite composers — Brahms, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg — and Babbitt’s Piano Concerto No.2 with Juilliard alumnus, pianist Conor Hanick.

A highlight of the opening night program is the world premiere of Babbitt’s Concerti for Violin, Orchestra, and Synthesized Sound, which had been lost for nearly 40 years. The piece had been commissioned by Isidor Lateiner, a violinist and brother of the late Jacob Lateiner, a Juilliard faculty member from 1966-2010. When Isidor passed away in 2005, he bequeathed the score and solo part to Jacob, who was a major collector. After Jacob’s death, when his collection was up for sale, the auctioneer offered the Babbitt score to Jane Gottlieb, Vice President for Library and Information Resources, who immediately acquired it. Unfortunately, Babbitt had never finished the tape part. Since all pitches and rhythms are in the score, Jonathan Dawe — his student and friend — and Nathan Prillaman of Juilliard’s Center for Innovation in the Arts, using today’s technology, are realizing the electronics for live keyboard players. All Focus! festival events are free; tickets are available at events.juilliard.edu.

Download the Program Notes About Milton Babbitt Milton Babbitt was one of the most influential composers and music theorists of the 20th century. He passed away on January 29, 2011, in Princeton, New Jersey where he had resided for many years. He was a member of the Juilliard composition faculty from 1971 to 2008 and remained an emeritus faculty member. Born on May 10, 1916, in Philadelphia, Milton Babbitt grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. He began playing the violin at age 4, and was playing jazz gigs as a teenage clarinetist. When he was 16, he became interested in serialism and Arnold Schoenberg’s music, which became a major influence on his work as a composer. Mr. Babbitt received his bachelor’s degree from N.Y.U., his master’s degree and PhD from Princeton University where he was on the faculty from 1938 to 1984 and remained an emeritus professor of composition. He received a special Pulitzer citation in 1982; he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986.

Juilliard presented Milton Babbitt with an honorary Doctor of Music degree in 2006. Meet the Artists Joel Sachs Joel Sachs, founder and director of the New Juilliard Ensemble, performs a vast range of traditional and contemporary music as a conductor and pianist. As co-director of the internationally acclaimed new music ensemble Continuum, he has appeared in hundreds of performances in New York, nationally, and throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has also conducted orchestras and ensembles in Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, El Salvador, Germany, Iceland, Mexico, Mongolia, Switzerland, and Ukraine, and has held new music residencies in Berlin, Shanghai, London, Salzburg, Curitiba (Brazil), Helsinki, and the Banff Centre (Canadian Rockies). One of the most active presenters of new music in New York, Dr. Sachs founded New Juilliard Ensemble in 1993. He produces and directs Juilliard’s annual FOCUS! festival, and has been artistic director of Juilliard’s concerts at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) since 1993. A member of Juilliard’s music history faculty, Dr.

Sachs wrote a biography of the American composer Henry Cowell, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Dr. Sachs often appears on radio as a commentator on recent music; he was the studio guest and a prominent performer on BBC Radio 3’s recent Composer of the Week show, which devoted five one-hour programs to Cowell. A graduate of Harvard, Dr. Sachs received his PhD from Columbia University. In 2011, he was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard University for his work in support of new music, and received the National Gloria Artis Medal of the Polish Government for his service to Polish music. In 2002, he was given Columbia University’s Alice M. Ditson Award for his service to American Music. New Juilliard Ensemble Led by founding director Joel Sachs and now in its 23rd season, New Juilliard Ensemble (N.J.E.), presents music by a variety of international composers writing in the most diverse styles. Its members, current students at Juilliard, are admitted to the ensemble by audition.

Student interest in the ensemble’s work is considerable: more than 100 students participate each year, although the maximum size of compositions played is normally 15–20 players. The ensemble has premiered some 100 compositions, appears regularly at MoMA’s Summergarden, has been a featured ensemble four times at the Lincoln Center Festival, and opened this season on September 11 with an 80th-birthday concert for Arvo Pärt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A highlight of the 2013–14 season was a collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Bicentennial Celebration with the U.S. premieres of works by Magnus Lindberg and Judith Weir. N.J.E. has collaborated with Carnegie Hall festivals “UBUNTU: Music and Arts of South Africa” (2014); “Voices from Latin America” (2012); “JapanNYC” (2011), and “Ancient Paths, Modern Voices” (2009).

In June 2009, the New Juilliard Ensemble toured Japan; the following December it performed aleatory music at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with an exhibition of Persian and Turkish “divining” manuscripts. The ensemble annually opens Juilliard’s FOCUS! Festival, whose recent themes have included “California: A Century of New Music” (2009); “Music at the Center: Composing an American Mainstream” (2010); “Polish Modern: New Directions in Polish Music Since 1945” (2011); “Sounds Re-Imagined: John Cage at 100” (2012); “The British Renaissance” (2013); “Alfred Schnittke’s World” (2014); and “Nippon Gendai Ongaku: Japanese Music Since 1945” (2015). Jeffrey Milarsky American conductor Jeffrey Milarsky is the founding music director of AXIOM. Known for his innovative programming, he has been hailed for his interpretation of a wide range of repertoire, which spans from Bach to Xenakis.

In recent seasons he has worked with such orchestras as the San Francisco Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, MET Chamber Ensemble, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic, New York City Opera, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New World Symphony, Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic chamber music series. In the United States and abroad, he has premiered and recorded works by many groundbreaking contemporary composers, in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall, Davies Symphony Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall, and at IRCAM in Paris. In June of 2015, Mr. Milarsky made his New York Philharmonic debut conducting the CONTACT! series, a Japanese based program including music of Takemitsu, Messiaen, Fujikura, and Mochizuki. Mr. Milarsky has a long history of premiering, recording and performing American composers and in keeping with that he was presented the prestigious Ditson Conductor's Award in 2013.

He has collaborated with such composers as Adams, Babbitt, Cage, Carter, Corigliano, Crumb, Davidovsky, Druckman, Gordon, Lang, Mackey, Rouse, Shapey, Subotnick, Wuorinen, and an entire generation of young and developing composers. A dedicated teacher, Mr. Milarsky serves on the conducting faculty at Juilliard and is a senior lecturer in music at Columbia University, where he is the music director and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. An in-demand timpanist and percussionist, Mr.Milarsky has been the principal timpanist for the Santa Fe Opera since 2005. In addition, he has performed and recorded with the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Pittsburgh Symphony. He has recorded extensively for Angel, Bridge, Teldec, Telarc, New World, CRI, MusicMasters, EMI, Koch, and London records. At Juilliard, Mr. Milarsky received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and was awarded the Peter Mennin Prize for outstanding leadership and achievement in the arts.

Juilliard Orchestra The Juilliard Orchestra, Juilliard’s largest and most visible performing ensemble, is comprised of all orchestral instrumental majors in the bachelor’s and master’s degree programs. Under the musical leadership of alumnus Alan Gilbert, the director of conducting and orchestral studies, the Juilliard Orchestra is also led by numerous world-renowned guest conductors, some of which have included John Adams, alumna Marin Alsop, Vladimir Ashkenazy, alumnus James Conlon, Charles Dutoit, James Gaffigan, Fabio Luisi, Bernard Haitink, alumnus James Levine, David Robertson, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, alumnus Leonard Slatkin, Michael Tilson Thomas, David Zinman, and many others. The Juilliard Orchestra performs regularly at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, as well as in opera and dance productions, special events and broadcasts, and national and international tours. All undergraduates begin their orchestral studies with Orchestra Orientation, a three-week orchestra cycle comprised of seminars, workshops, and rehearsals designed to prepare students for the rigors of the Juilliard Orchestra.

Led by Maestro Gilbert, the Orchestra Orientation also calls upon Juilliard faculty and members of the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera orchestras to lead discussions, coach sectionals, and play in side-by-side rehearsals. In the 2015-16 season, the Juilliard Orchestra welcomes an impressive roster of world-renowned conductors: Pablo Heras-Casado, Fabio Luisi, Nicholas McGegan, Gianandrea Noseda, Case Scaglione, and faculty members Alan Gilbert, Jeffrey Milarsky, Itzhak Perlman, and Matthias Pintscher. Highlights of the orchestra’s 2014-15 season included debut appearances by guest conductors Fabio Luisi, Tadaaki Otaka, and alumnus Peter Oundjian; return appearances by Edward Gardner, Larry Rachleff, Emmanuel Villaume, David Zinman, and David Robertson; and concerts with Juilliard faculty members Alan Gilbert and Jeffrey Milarsky.

# # # MILTON BABBITT’S WORLD: A CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION Concert I | Friday, January 22, 2016, at 7:30pm| Peter Jay Sharp Theater New Juilliard Ensemble Joel Sachs, founding director and conductor Hugo Lee, oboe Milton BABBITT The Crowded Air (1988) Jonathan DAWE Déploration sur la mort de Milton Babbitt (2011, world premiere) Alexander GOEHR Verschwindendes Wort (Vanishing Word) (2005-6, world premiere) Stefan WOLPE Chamber Piece No.

2 (1965-67) Ursula MAMLOK Concerto for Oboe and Chamber Orchestra (1976/2003) Milton BABBITT Concerti for Violin, Orchestra, and Synthesized Sound (1975-6, world premiere) (electronics completed by Jonathan Dawe and Nathan Prillaman) Concert II | Monday, January 25, 2016, at 7:30pm| Peter Jay Sharp Theater Milton BABBITT Three Compositions for Piano (1947) Irving BERLIN "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from the film Follow the Fleet (1936) Stephen Sondheim "Send in the Clowns" from A Little Night Music (1973) and "What More Do I Need" from Saturday Night (1954) Milton BABBITT Three Theatrical Songs (1946) Milton BABBITT The Widow’s Lament in Springtime (1951) Charles WUORINEN Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1983) Elliott CARTER Bariolage (1972) Milton BABBITT My Ends are

 my Beginnings (1978) Milton BABBITT Sonnets (1955) Preconcert Panel Discussion | Tuesday, January 26, 2016, at 6:30pm| Peter Jay Sharp Theater Joel Sachs moderates the panel with Bethany Beardslee, Jonathan Dawe, Charles Wuorinen, and others.

Concert III | Tuesday, January 27, 2016, at 7:30pm| Peter Jay Sharp Theater Milton Babbitt Beaten Paths (1988) Vincent PERSICHETTI Parable XXII for Solo Tuba, Op. 147 (1981) Milton BABBITT Sheer Pluck (Composition for Guitar) (1984) Milton BABBITT Play it Again, Sam (1989) Samuel ADLER Four Composer Portraits (2001) Milton BABBITT An Encore (2006) Godfrey WINHAM Concert Piece (1975) Milton BABBITT A Solo Requiem (1976-7) Concert IV | Wednesday, January 27, 2016, at 7:30pm| Peter Jay Sharp Theater “Milton Babbitt’s Electronic and Live World” Milton BABBITT It takes twelve to Tango (1984) Milton BABBITT Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964) Mario DAVIDOVSKY Synchronisms No.

12, for clarinet and electronic sounds (2008) Paul LANSKY notjustmoreidlechatter (1989) for computer-manipulated voices Jimmy VINCENT Excerpts from A Jazz Set (1957, transcribed in 1990) Donald MARTINO A Set for Clarinet (1954) Earl KIM Dear Linda (1993) Milton BABBITT More Melismata (2005-6) Milton BABBITT Philomel (1964) for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound (Poem of John Hollander) Concert V | Thursday, January 28, 2016, at 7:30pm| Peter Jay Sharp Theater Milton BABBITT None but the Lonely Flute (1991) Roger SESSIONS Duo for violin and cello (1978) Miriam GIDEON Suite for Bassoon and Piano (1972) Milton BABBITT Manifold Music (1995) Kati AGOCS Versprechen (Promise) (2004) George PERLE Six Celebratory Inventions (1981-1

995) Milton BABBITT String Quartet No.

2 (1954) Concert VI | Friday, January 29, 2016, at 7:30pm| Alice Tully Hall Juilliard Orchestra Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor Conor Hanick, piano Johannes BRAHMS Chorale Prelude, Op. 122, No. 8, Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (There is a Rose in Flower; ca. 1896), orchestrated by Erich Leinsdorf Arnold SCHOENBERG Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) Igor STRAVINSKY Variations (Aldous Huxley in Memoriam) (1963-4) Milton BABBITT Piano Concerto No. 2 (1998)

Question: Whose musical works included Composition For Orchestra and Philomel?
Answer: Milton Babbit